Rust Early Access Review

Rust is a first person open world survival game. You spawn with nothing but a rock and the skin on your back. Your goal is simple, survive.

Rust is a indie survival game set on a procedural generated island. It has been on Steam since Dec. 11th 2013, but has gone through a complete revamp over the past year and a half. This game has meant a lot to me over the years, it’s a game where you can really find a community of people that can make this game feel like home. Even though a majority of the player base left once they started rebuilding it on the new unity engine, with the consistent updates and dev blogs a whole crop of new and old players are joining back onto to this very mad-max style island.

Rock (and roll)

STORYLINE

As you enter rust you start out with just the skin on your back, literally. You spawn completely naked armed with only a rock. Your goal is simple, survive. Everything from the elements, wildlife, and even your fellow new-mans are trying to kill you. Now how you go about that is up too you. You can become a nomad traveler, never really making a place of your own but always on the move. Or you could get a group of your friends and build a compound and try to claim a slot of land that you control. Now how I enjoy spending my time on rust is building a small little shack while trying to attack the larger more established groups. However there really are thousands of ways to sort of role-play the kind of person you want to be on rust.Lovely beach

CONTROLS

Now if you have played any rpg or fps games you should feel right at home. You use WASD to maneuver around the world. Using Tab will let  you access your inventory and equip items to your hot-bar or add different pieces of clothing to your character. E will enable you to interact with the rest of the world, it allows you to pick up items, access doors and various crafting tools. 1-9 on your keyboard is where you can use the items in your hot-bar. Aiming can be done with right mouse clicks, however if you press right mouse while holding an item other than a weapon you will toss it, so watch out! left click will let you fire your weapon, or gather materials if you have a hatchet, rock, or pick-axe in hand.

That's you

GRAPHICS

Since its re-launch Rust has really improved its look and feel. It’s not the best looking game out there but with the for the type of game it is, the graphics fit nicely into the world. When you start up Rust, you will be presented by a small menu giving the options Fastest to Fantastic, now this will be your main way of changing the graphic settings but you can adjust a few minor graphic options once you get into the game.

Nature

GAMEPLAY

Now to say you have to grind in this game is very much a understatement. If you want something done you’re going to have to build it yourself, that means gathering wood,stone,cloth,ore. But this means having to go out and farm while under the threat of players, and everything else that can kill you. Before you start worrying about that you’re going to need tools, your rock will do for the earliest parts of the game but you’re going to need a pick-axe and hatchet. You can get stone and wood from various trees around you. Once you have those made you can start trying to farm for a little cabin to act as your shelter. There are a couple ways to go about this, my personal favorite approach is to farm during the night, sure it might be harder to see, but this goes both ways. Farming at night makes it so the guy sitting up on his roof with a bolt action wont immediately shoot you down. However if you want to farm during the day you’re going to need to watch your back, that means being alert, and being aware of your surroundings, if there are any people that look like a threat you don’t feel like dealing with the best way is too just run.

How to cut down a tree with a rock
Once you round up some resources and go real estate shopping to find a nice neighborhood too build in, you’re going to want to build quickly, standing still while building is a easy way to get shot, you want to your walls up as fast as possible. Upgrading your walls to at least wood to prevent people from just invading your home. Getting the door and lock on is a must. Sleeping bags will let you re-spawn on it, however there is a timer on re spawning, so it will be a good idea to place a couple around your house to help you out.

Let's build something
Alright so you got your wood cabin set up, now what do you do? Well my advice would be to build a furnace, but for that you’re going to lots of animal fat, cloth, wood, and a bit of stone. Pigs are going to be your best bet for animal fat, they also give cloth but you can gather some as you walk around farming from the hemp plants (looks like a weed plant, cant really miss it). Alright make it home safe an sound? Good, it’s time to start smelting some ore, metal ore creates metal fragments (frags for short), and sulfur ore makes sulfur which you can use with charcoal to create gunpowder. Now smelting ore is going to take sometime, so if you got a movie or some Netflix to catch up on now would be a good time, but be sure to check back in to make sure you don’t starve to death or some nice raiders didn’t pay you a visit.

Jacket and? Nothing else...
At this point in the game it’s really up to  you to experiment with how you want to build. You could keep expanding your shack and make it into a somewhat impenetrable compound. Or maybe you want go around shooting every guy you see on sight. This is really the core of rust game-play, you can live your rust life however you see fit. It’s a giant sandbox with a 100 people doing different thing. That’s why you can spend hours upon hours playing this game, every play-through is going to be different, sometimes you die 20 times trying to get resources, sometimes you get robbed and left with nothing but your bare skin. You could also be taken prisoner and locked in a cell, trust me if there is something you can think of you can almost certainly do it in rust.

SUMMARY

3 years and almost 800 hours later, I still always come back for rust. If it wasn’t for Dark Souls 3 I would probably playing it right now. The dev team is great in this game, weekly up dates are really a light in the tunnel from all these survival games that really don’t put much effort into it. Even though it’s been in alpha for over a year (since rebuilding the game), and probably will be for sometime but i can’t wait for it to become finished developing.

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